I have started a small board, and want to review design rules.
Clicking the “Board Setup” icon below the menu causes the main PCBnew window to lose focus, but no dialog appears. I’ve looked on the taskbar, and alt-tabbed, but there is only the PCBnew window and the Kicad project manager window. Clicking anywhere in the PCBnew window results in the error sound. Pressing escape returns to normal operation.
In a past version of Kicad I seem to remember having some trouble with error screens doing a ‘pop under’ and it drove me nuts trying to figure out why I was stuck. It didn’t show in the task bar either.
All those dialog windows are usually forced to the front (and therefore also the “main” Pcbnew window looses focus) This is by design to prevent complex interactions of opening multiple such windows at the same time.
It may be that you have tweaked your OS, and the dialog is drawn “under” the main Pcbnew window if you do not see it.
paulvdh, you’re right, I linked the wrong image. Fixed.
And I think you’re also right about the board setup appearing “under” the main window.
When the dialog it is open, I cannot click on any part of the main window to move it away.
I can make the PCBnew window small enough that the dialog cannot hide, but that’s a poor workaround.
You say " you have tweaked your OS…" I have not intentionally, but can you tell me more about the types of tweaks that might cause this symptom?
Thanks for the tip on copy version info: (Curious about it reporting Windows 8. Winver.exe reports “Windows 10 Version 1909, build 18363,836”)
Application: Pcbnew
Version: (5.1.6)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.66.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1d (Schannel) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.1.1) nghttp2/1.39.2
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.71.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.66.0
Compiler: GCC 9.2.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON
I have not touched a windoze computer in 4+ years.
On my Linux box I have lots of options for such things, though I do not want to spend much time fiddling with them. For example, there is a “focus follows mouse”, which can give a window focus as soon as the mouse cursor hovers over it. There are also options for “prevent focus stealing”. There seem to be sightly different options on different Linux desktops and I assume windoze has similar options. A long time ago in Windoze 95 (98?) there was a program called something like “tweak_UI” with such options.
Sometimes there is also an option to block the “keep window on top” behavior.
If you suspect your popup window has become an popunder window, then you can first make the Pcbnew window smaller, and then drag it a bit around to see if the other window becomes visible.
The “minimize” button on Pcbnew minimizes both Pcbnew and the popup window, but the popup stays where it is when I drag the Pcbnew window around.
